Yuki Takahashi
Welcome to my website. I am a postdoctoral researcher at
Tilburg University.
I am an applied microeconomist working in the areas of Behavioral Economics, Gender Economics, and Labor Economics.
I am particularly interested in how biases, (self-)stereotypes, and social norms affect
individual and group behaviors and their consequences on the educational, labor market, and other life outcomes.
I received my PhD in Economics from the
University of Bologna in July 2022.
I am non-binary (pronoun: they/them). You can find my CV here.
You can contact me at: y.takahashi@uvt.nl
Working papers
In a quasi-laboratory experiment, I show that individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who corrected them, even when the correction benefited the team. The likely mechanism is negative feedback aversion: more confident individuals are much less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes but not those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find suggestive evidence that men, but not women, are less willing to collaborate with women who corrected their mistakes, potentially due to (inaccurate) beliefs about women's abilities. This reluctance to collaborate with those who corrected them can undermine teamwork, especially in mixed-gender teams.
The decision to arrest men who abuse their partner is often at the police officers' discretion, especially when the abuse is not serious. However, such light abuse may accumulate and deteriorate women's wellbeing. This paper uses Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized light domestic and non-domestic violence as a natural experiment to study the effect of decriminalization of light intimate partner violence on married women's wellbeing. Using difference-in-differences and flexibly controlling for macroeconomic shocks with unmarried, non-cohabitating women as a control group, I find that the reform decreased married women's life satisfaction and increased depression. The effect size is similar for college-educated women and women in high-qualified occupations who may be more sensitive to general violence norms. The likely mechanism is that the reform muted married women because the law no longer protected them from their partners' light abuses: while unmarried women began to express less tolerance toward intimate partner violence, married women did not. Also, married or unmarried men did not change their tolerance significantly, suggesting that the effect is women-specific. These findings suggest that decriminalizing intimate partner violence decreases married women's wellbeing, even if it is a light one, and highlight the importance of legal institutions in harnessing intimate partner violence.
Although evidence suggests men are more generous to women than to men, it may stem from paternalism and could reverse when women excel in important skills for one's career success, such as cognitive skills. Using a dictator game, this paper studies whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the receivers' IQ relative to the dictators', I do not find evidence consistent with this hypothesis; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with equivalent IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution and are robust to the so-called ``beauty premium.'' Also, female dictators' allocations are qualitatively similar to male dictators. These findings suggest that women who excel in cognitive skills may not receive less favorable treatment than equally intelligent men in the labor market.
Work in progress
Attention Discrimination in Performance Evaluation (with Jan Hausfeld and Boris van Leeuwen)
Are Men Driving Away Women from STEM Fields? (with Chihiro Inoue and Asumi Saito)
Curriculum Reform and Female Students' Major Choice (with Dede Long)
